Keith Laumer - Fat Chance.rtf

Fat Chance

Keith Laumer

Dedicated to the incomparable Raymond Chandler
And to his peerless private eye, Philip Marlowe

Chapter 1

I guess it was dinnertime because the smell of hot grease was floating up from the kitchen of the Maxwell House Hotel across the alley. I wasn’t working, just resting my ankles on the corner of my desk and wondering why I’d ever bought a pair of purple Argyles with lemon-yellow clocks; but the intellectual challenge was too much for me. I yawned and the buzzer sounded from the spare office I call my reception room. That told me somebody had opened the hall door. I finished off the yawn and was thinking about getting my feet off the desk and the alert, confident look of an efficient private investigator on my face when suddenly somebody was standing in the connecting doorway. His body was broad enough to almost fill it, which made him look shorter than he was, until you noticed he had to duck a little coming through. His face was broad and scarred, with the faded tan of an ex-outdoor man; he had short gray hair that lay flat on a round, hard-looking skull. His shoulders looked like the abutments for Boulder Dam. Anyway, he had wide shoulders. He looked like a circus strong man in town to visit his grandchildren.

His little, pale blue eyes roamed around the room, came back to rest on me. He came on into the room, hooked the guest chair around and sat in it carefully, as if he’d had a chair break under him once and wasn’t risking a repeat. All this made about as much noise as a bare foot on a bath mat.

“I’m Lou Anglich,” he said, in a rumble that came from down around his shoes. He said it as if it was information I’d been waiting for, and would be glad to get. “You’re Shaw, huh?”

I nodded. “You move pretty well, Mr. Anglich,” I said. “But why waste it on me?”

“You don’t get me, Shaw. A fellow named Lacey in the sheriff’s office sent me. I maybe got a job for you.” He looked around the room again, carefully, frowning at the near-walnut chairs, the rust-red carpet, the old calendar with Rembrandt on it, the back of my name on the glass door.

“You must have dough, the front you put up,” he said. He was wearing the kind of sport coat a lumberjack would go to the state fair in. He put a big hand inside it and lifted out a well-fed wallet. He tore it open and grabbed money from it, jammed the wallet back in a side pocket, poked through the bills and picked out the ones he liked. They were hundreds. I liked them too. He reached across and shoved a few of them under the pen set on the desk.

He leaned back and flashed some gold crowns at me.

“Dough is no problem,” he said. “Maybe you know me better now, huh?”

I put my hands back of my head and looked at the water stains on the ceiling.

“Anglich, Lou or Louis,” I said. “Former Tampa stevedore, deck hand, union enforcer. You operated a rum and guns service in and out of Cuba for a while, until the Coast Guard closed it down. You switched to bolita, ran up a tidy stake, came West. Bought real estate in the right places, made money. Hungarian ancestry, no family. No police record since Tampa.”

“Geeze,” he said. “I pretty near forgot about the bolita myself.”

“You said Lacey sent you. What did he think we might have in common?”

His little eyes pinched down, looked speculative. “I kind of expected a bigger layout. If you’re so good, why you operate out of this mousetrap?”

“I’ve wondered about that myself. I think Lacey gave you a bum steer.”

“Maybe a cheapie is what I want, at that.” He shifted in the chair. The chair creaked. “A cheapie that can keep his yap buttoned.”

“There’s another thing,” I said. “I have a somewhat restricted clientele.”

“Huh?” He creaked the chair again. “I can pay my way, you seen that.”

“You’ve got your own kind of connections, Mr. Anglich. I’m not sure we’d get along.”

His forehead narrowed down to an inch wide; he opened his mouth to scare me and then changed his tack. He shifted around in the chair and grinned an almost shy grin.

“Look, guy, I been out of the rackets twenty years. That dough’s as clean as church bingo.”

“Maybe cleaner. I still don’t think I’m the man to earn it.”

Anglich nodded as if I was finally seeing it his way. “Swell,” he said. “You got principles. Nice, if you can afford ‘em. Me, I come up the hard way. Maybe I cut a few corners on the way. But you think Lacey would of steered me to you if I was still working that side of the street?”

“I hope not.”

“I get it. The widows’ and orphans’ pal. But a guy which maybe he ain’t had all the breaks―toss him out on his can. Even if he’s a father.”

It was a pretty funny line coming from who it came from, but he wasn’t smiling. Something hunted peeped out of the little pale eyes just for a moment, and went away again.

“I guess I slipped on that one,” I said.

He got out the wallet again and rummaged, came up with a small photo of the kind itinerant fruit pickers have in their passport, passed it across. It was the face of a child barely old enough to sit up, with big round eyes, a solemn mouth, hair cut short and tied with a messy bow.

“That’s Little Anya,” he said. “My kid, see? I don’t see her in maybe twenty-five years now, but I never forget. I had to give her up, yeah; but I don’t forget. I get a stake, I come out here and make good. Now I want to find her, make it up to her. You can help me, huh?”

I got a pipe out of the drawer and poked at it with a burned matchstick.

“Listen,” he said. “Lacey says you’re a all right guy. I tell you a secret. Anya ain’t really my kid at all. I picked her up on the street in Ybor City, just a poor little throwed-away baby. I don’t know who her real folks was. Maybe I didn’t have no right―but what the hell―a little kid like that . . . .”

“Stole her, huh?”

“You don’t know how it was in them days. Or maybe you do. It wasn’t like now. No big welfare handouts. Nobody give a damn. I put her in a home―a nice place, trees and flowers, other kids to play with. I got to go away, business, you know? Then I come back; she’s gone. They give her away. Give her to some stranger; they say I signed papers that let them do that―the lousy punks. My Anya!”

I stared out the window, watching a high, fleecy cloud that looked like a unicorn’s head shred itself out into nothing.

“I ask questions, but they wouldn’t tell me nothing,” Anglich went on. “So I wait, two, three years, until I got some of the stuff that talks the language all them guys can understand. Then I try again.”

I looked at the photo on the desk and squared it up with a finger. Anglich hitched his chair closer. “There was a mug at the agency I got next. Cost me five cees but he told me Anya was took from the home by a couple name of Conroy, six months after I left her. They come West to work in a war plant. That’s the reason I come out here.”

“You’ve been here six years. How does it happen you’re just now looking for her?”

He leaned back and gave me an important frown. “I looked some the first year. But dough was tight; I got noplace. Now it’s different. I got something to offer Anya, now.” He took out a handkerchief that was less than a yard square and wiped under his chin and behind the ears with it.

“Any lead on these Conroys?”

“I figure maybe they changed their name.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “You don’t want a detective, Mr. Anglich, you want Adalian the Psychic. Now if you’re through wasting my time I’d like to catch up on my foot-dangling.”

He thrust out his lower lip.

“You telling me you won’t find Anya for me?”

“You don’t really want me to, Mr. Anglich. You’re not really trying.”

His head jumped back as if he’d been slapped with a fish. His jaw dropped. He reached up a big, square hand and felt tenderly of his chin. He grinned.

“Hey,” he said. “Maybe you’re OK at that.” The grin dropped; he leaned forward and got an elbow on the desk. “Monday night I get a phone call. I don’t recognize the voice. The guy says, ‘Hey, maybe you’d like to see your daughter, Anya, huh?’ Just like that. After all these years.

“I say ‘Yeah, sure, who’s this?’

“ ‘Never mind that,’ the guy says. ‘Five grand is the price.’

“I say, ‘You nuts or something?’ Stalling, see? He says, ‘You heard me, brother. Five grand. Just take off your sock and count the toes. No more, no less. Think it over. We’ll call you later.’ And he hangs up on me.”

“And?”

“Nothing. I pretty near go nuts waiting. I don’t get no call. And all the time I wonder: Who is this mug? What’s Anya to him? Maybe he’s got her someplace, maybe he’s hurting her! The dough don’t mean nothing―but if he hurts her, I break his neck with my hands.”

I looked at him carefully; then I grinned a little. “Nuts, you’re just playing games.”

He sat bolt upright and looked ominous; then he relaxed and put his big hands on the desk and looked at them.

“Yeah, I’m still holding out. I dunno why.” He dipped into the inside pocket and fished out a small envelope, opened it and slipped out a second photograph, laid it in front of me.

“This is supposed to be the guy, Conroy. It’s a old shot, made back when they taken Anya away.”

I swiveled to get more light on the picture. It was a blurry snapshot of a turkey-thin fellow in a wide-cut white suit holding a shapeless Panama at his side, standing in front of a board fence. He had a bony, long-chinned face, thinning black hair, deep-set eyes that showed no light or warmth, a mouth like a carp that had been hooked plenty of times but never boated.

“Better,” I said. “Not good, but better. Who have you showed this to? Lately, I mean.”

Anglich shifted his seat in the chair. “I tried a couple local adoption agencies. My contact down South says these kind of outfits work together. According to him, they got to like inspect the foster home and that. But I draw a blank. They never seen Anya, they heard of no Conroy.”

“This contact down South: would he have a name?”

“Pate. A. J. Pate. But he’s out of the picture, years ago. Croaked, maybe. Too bad. I would of liked to of did the job myself. A rat like that. Selling a father info on his own kid, and holding out at that.”

“Holding out what?”

“That pic you’re looking at. I was tipped he had it. I had to twist the sucker plenty before he come acrost.”

“Let’s get this straight,” I said. “You’ve got a couple of twenty-five-year-old snaps and a name, and you want me to tie it to a woman who would be about twenty-six or-seven years old, probably married with three kids, and wouldn’t know you from Noah’s pet mongoose.”

He frowned and rubbed his chin, watching me. I got a bottle of rye out of the deep drawer and poured a couple of ponies. He picked his up and threw it at his tonsils as if he was mad at them.

“It don’t sound like much the way you put it,” he said. “But I got to find her, Shaw―and fast.” His voice implored me, as if all he had to do was convince me.

I sampled my drink. It was as good as warm whisky usually is. “Why not tell me what’s really bothering you, Mr. Anglich? Then maybe I can tell you if there’s anything in all this.”

He put his hands flat on the desk and stared down at the square, manicured nails.

“I’m being tailed,” he said in a dead voice. “I spotted the guy two, three times already. Or maybe there’s two of ‘em. In a gray VW with a crease in the left front fender. They been on me for two days now.”

“Any idea who’d be that interested?”

“Yeah. You could say I left some unfinished business back in Tampa. At least there’s guys might see it that way.” He shook his head. “I thought I was clean, after six years. But I guess once you get that kind of dirt on you, it don’t never come off.” His eyes were on me again, scared eyes. “That’s why I got to find Anya now, fast. Before it’s too late.”

“Talking that way doesn’t get you anywhere,” I said, and poured him another shot. “Mob rub-outs have gone out of style.”

“OK, so maybe I’m nuts. But what if I ain’t? Lacey said you were a all right guy, Shaw. Help me find little Anya.”

I reached across and slid the bills out from under the pen stand, flaked off one, handed the others back to him. A slow grin lit his battered old face like sunshine on rock.

“I knew you were a all right guy, Shaw,” he said.

“Sure, I’m a good guy,” I said. “But don’t get up a testimonial dinner just yet. I’ll see what I can do. That may turn out to be nothing. It has before, plenty of times.”

“Just so you try, Shaw. That’s all I’m asking.”

“I’ll want the address of the orphanage, the places you’ve tried here, anything you’ve got on these Conroys, where they worked and so on.”

“Yeah, sure, I remember all I can.” He remembered out loud for a while, and I wrote it down. It wasn’t much. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and watched me frown at my notes.

“Don’t expect too much,” I said. “After this long you know chances aren’t good. And if I turn up anything it might cost you some money.”

“Don’t worry. I got plenty scratch.” He stood and jammed the leftover bills in a pocket.

“Where can I reach you?” I asked. “If I get anything.”

“I ain’t settled. I’ll call in.” He turned to the door, turned back.

“One other thing,” he said. “When Anya was just a little baby, she always loved dogs.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll remember that.”

He rolled on out, as silent as a shadow for all his tonnage. I hardly heard the outer door click.

I put his hundred in my shirt pocket, mixed myself a long drink, and sat down in the chair that was still warm from him. I played with the drink for a while and watched the light get yellower and the shadows creep across the office.

I rinsed the glass out at the wash bowl and looked at my face in the mirror. It looked back at me. The years had left a lot of tracks on it. I yawned, giving myself a good view of my fillings.

“You’re lucky, Shaw,” I said. “You’ve got your own teeth to have fillings in.”

I put on my coat and went down to the street.

Chapter 2

Morry Blumenthal was a lean, grizzle-haired sourpuss. He was also city editor of the Independent. He was sitting back of a desk that had probably been new once―about the time Henry Ford raised wages to five dollars a day. His eyes were closed. When I was six feet away he opened them and yawned. “Hello, Joe. You still on the outside?”

“Don’t let me bother you if you’re working,” I said. I got out the picture Anglich said was a man named Conroy, held it out to him.

“I’ll bet you can’t put a name to the face.”

He rolled an eye at it, closed both eyes. “You win.”

“Try again. There’s ten bucks riding on it.”

He stretched out an arm that was not as long as a deck crane and took the photo, frowned at it, frowned at me.

“Well―I could be wrong. This is an old picture, late thirties I’d say by the cut of the suit. And faces change. But it could be . . . “

“Sure. Could be who?”

“Remember old man Prendergast?”

“Me too,” I said. “Let’s go browse the clip files.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s too early to say―as they say in the papers.”

A cute little blond typist looked up grinning and winked at me as he unfolded himself and led the way down an aisle of desks into a room full of filing cabinets. It was a minute or two before he grunted and tossed a folder on the table.

“Have fun, pal. Even an old buzzard as publicity-shy as Prendergast gets mentioned a few times in twenty years.”

I leafed through it: Mr. Harvey Wade Prendergast, noted industrialist, attends NAM conference, returns from tour of European business centers, lays cornerstone, plans merger, dies suddenly. There were a few half tone cuts of the narrow bloodless face, the hair slicked sideways across the skull, looking much as it did in the photo Anglich had given me―if the photo was really Prendergast. There was no mention of any family.

“Prendergast have any children?” I asked.

“A daughter or two, as I recall. And of course, a wife.”

“How old? The daughters, I mean.”

“Old enough. Late twenties, I guess. Why?”

“The obit says he died of acute food poisoning after a family picnic. Botulism. Kind of an old-fashioned way to go.”

“He was an old-fashioned guy. Hell, he still wore wing collars with his dinner suit.”

“I don’t suppose there was any question about the diagnosis?”

Morry looked at me sideways. “After two years, I’d say the question is academic.”

“Yeah. Just my instinct for the nasty thought. By the way, was either of the daughters adopted?”

Morry pulled at a long lower lip. “Not that I ever heard. You could go out and ask them―but don’t say I sent you.”

“The family still at the same address?”

“I haven’t heard of five acres in Mayfair Heights going on the market.”

I thanked him, promised him a drink at an unspecified date, and went on out.

The blond girl was still typing, but now she looked sad and disappointed, as if the funny man had turned out to be a villain after all.

It was too late in the day for social calls. I had a sandwich and three or four drinks, sat through most of a movie that had been photographed during a power failure, and went home to bed.

Chapter 3

The Harvey Wade Prendergast house was on one of those wide, curving streets that was laid out before they started platting real estate by the square inch. A Korean gardener who was manicuring a pansy bed spared me a sneer as I turned in at the gate. The house was big, but not more than twenty rooms, with a Spanish tile roof and lots of wrought iron in the right places, some nice imported trees, plenty of magnolias and bougainvillaea, and a circular parking space at the top of the drive with two cars parked in it. One was a little silvery-gray Jaguar and the other a big yellow El Dorado. Farther back I could see a four-car garage and grounds stretching across to some stately old trees that seemed to stand a little aloof from the rest of the composition, as if they’d been there before the house and would be there after it was gone.

I pulled in beyond the Jaguar and set the brake and got out and sniffed some expensive morning air of the kind that’s only found behind trimmed hedges, above clipped lawns. It was nice air, filtered and scented; the breeze blew with a pleasant restraint; it knew better than to get tough around here.

I went along the flagstones to the front door, which was built up out of rough oak planks and hung on iron straps and looked strong enough to withstand a siege. Before I had time to poke the bell, the door opened and a smooth-looking old bird in a fawn-colored jacket and an ascot tie and a nice head of wavy gray hair stepped out. He looked a little surprised to see me.

He said, “Oh―was there something?” and stood with his hand on the doorknob, not exactly blocking my entrance, but not exactly ushering me in, either.

“Shaw is the name,” I said. “Mrs. Prendergast at home?”

“I’m afraid Mrs. Prendergast isn’t seeing anyone just now. She’s not well, you know. Possibly I could help, Mr. . . . .. ah . . . Shaw.”

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